Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday March 29, 2012 @10:54AM
from the bathing-in-lawyer-saliva dept.

redletterdave writes "After the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) won a battle with Apple after alleging the Cupertino-based company was misleading customers about its third-generation iPad, authorities in other countries are now assessing the compatibility of the new iPad with local 4G LTE networks to see if their customers should deserve refunds too. The UK's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) confirmed on Tuesday that it is investigating complaints of Apple's misleading '4G' claim, while Sweden and Denmark are also reportedly considering investigations, after agencies within both countries received 'several complaints' from customers about 4G connectivity. Even though these countries carry broad LTE coverage, the new iPad isn't supported on any of those networks."

I blame this part on the 4G standards body. If they had taken a hard stand when some carriers advertised "4G" when they were not, then AT&T and Apple and the like wouldn't have much room to argue. Instead there's some wiggle room as they can argue that 4G designation applies to them as well.

If you advertise a device as "4G-LTE" compatible without qualification, and it not compatible with 4G-LTE in that country (where you are advertising it as 4G-LTE compatible), that is misleading advertisment.

The car analogy would actually be saying "This car can go 100mph!" when it can only go 100mph if you drive it down a hill. Technically correct, but not actually an applicable statement in most situations where you actually drive the car, and therefore misleading advertising.

And yes, advertising is often misleading (that is a fair amount of the point of advertising), but to advertise a device so that it looks like it has worldwide 4G capability (which they did) when it does not (which it doesn't) is false advertising.